After purchasing a Commodore 64 gaming console in the early ’80s, BAFTA award-winning Danish composer Jesper Kyd got introduced to the SID chip. This discovery led him to create some of the first chip music. Within a few years, he was making game music on the Sega Genesis. Kyd quickly became synonymous with game composing. He helmed the iconic Hitman and the massively successful Assassin’s Creed. Kyd’s Warhammer 40,000: Darktide score showcases a dynamic juxtaposition of choral music, industrial beats, and vintage sounds. The composer speaks at length about his beginnings, love of Roland gear, and the power of the gaming audience.
On Commodore 64 Beginnings
“My interest in video game music was shaped on the Commodore 64 and all the great British composers at the time. Man, they just blew me away. A whole new music style got invented called chip or SID music, which is still around today. Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, and Tim Follin were my favorite composers. They were able to connect with the music emotionally, which was very unusual for what I liked to call ‘beep beep’ music.
PCs had a rudimentary beep sound, but the C64 had an analog sound chip. I got inspired by many great scores on the C64, including the game Knuckle Busters, which had a 15-minute main title cue. My desire to make music for video games started there, and my interest exploded when I got a program for the C64 that allowed me to make music. Then I started saving for my first Roland synthesizer. Roland has had such a huge impact on my life that it’s hard to put into words. It’s probably my favorite company, with Lego being a close second.”
On First Synth and Scores
“I got a Roland D-20 around the same time the D-50 came out. The D-20 had a sequencer and some rudimentary quantization. But in those days, you had to play everything and layer things yourself. That machine taught me so much. By that point, I’d done some titles for the Sega Genesis and Sega Mega Drive consoles. We’d even made our own music program to play sounds at 44 kHz when most of the games had crappy-sounding samples using Sega’s own software.
The first time I wrote a non-chip music score was for the games Amok and Scorcher, which came out for the Sega Saturn and PC in 1996. My score for Hitman also had a big impact on my career. I remember using the Roland JD-990 a lot on that score. When Assassin’s Creed came along, the game exploded in ways none of us could have anticipated, and the love for those is still strong today.”
“Roland has had such a huge impact on my life that it’s hard to put into words.”
On Games vs. Film Scoring
“I’ve always had a problem comparing gaming and film scoring. “We shouldn’t focus on surpassing film music because we shouldn’t focus on comparing games to film. I work a lot in film and TV, and it’s a totally different musical approach. The enormous fan base that exists for game music is unique. There have been 19 concerts playing my music this year, and there’s also an Assassin’s Creed world tour.
The interesting thing about gaming is that it takes a lot longer to experience and play a game than to watch a movie. You develop a much closer relationship with the characters and the score. You can spend up to 1,000 hours playing a game, so the music becomes part of who you are. When we do these concerts, I sometimes see people crying, and I don’t think you get that same reaction when you watch something related to film.”
“Games are much more about world-building. The best example is Tumbbad, a dark fantasy film from India. I spent a few months experimenting before writing three hours of music for the movie, which is 90-100 minutes long. The first few hours of music were not used in the film. They were to build the world, and then I wrote the score to fit the story and characters. With video games, you sometimes get asked to write five hours of score, but all that world-building usually gets used because of the space and room.”
“Some aspects of game music have surpassed film, such as the enormous fan base that exists for that type of music.”
On Warhammer
“I’d been working on the Borderlands games for a long time, but because there is an element of humor, the sci-fi music could never be too heavy or serious. I was itching to go in that direction. The Warhammer world is incredibly interesting, and there are so many books about it since the ’80s. Behind the story, there’s a lot of lore regarding how humankind has advanced 40,000 years into the future and the people of Tertium’s outlook on technology.
The game is a first-person shooter that’s very intense and a bit macabre. One of the first things I got asked was how we could put living machines into the music while adding an almost religious perspective. The soundtrack has a lot of live, organic elements mixed with synthesizers. My philosophy with all the vintage gear was that it sounds used, it’s been around the block, and it’s imperfect. I wanted to find those imperfections and bring them out to add color and flavor to the score because those sounds are a good fit for the Warhammer world.”
“The game takes place so far into the future that we wanted to create sounds that were really holy, angelic, and far out. We did about 23 tracks with the Budapest Scoring Choir, which was such a blast. It makes me laugh when people say the choir is an electronic mishmash because everything in there got recorded live but treated, so it no longer sounds live. There are also some folk vocals and sounds derived from acoustic instruments like dueling violins to help add a sense of anarchy to the music.”
Roland Roundup
Creating the Main Theme
“When I wrote the main theme, I wanted a throbbing bassline to pierce through this dark, intense theme and produce an otherworldly sound. For that, I used a Roland SYSTEM-100 Model 104 sequencer. It’s one of the best step sequencers ever made. But it’s from the early ’70s, so I had the challenge of getting it to talk to Cubase and my Eurorack system. I had someone build me a custom-made device to achieve that and add some swing to the tempo until I could sequence this funky bassline.”
"I wanted a throbbing bassline to pierce through this dark, intense theme and produce an otherworldly sound. For that, I used a Roland SYSTEM-100 Model 104 sequencer."
Bass Layering and Other Tones
“The bass you’re listening to on the Darktide theme is a beat-up Roland SH-1000 layered with a Roland SH-5. Mixing those two elements gave me a wonderful, thick bassline that sounded a bit out of control. It fit with the whole anarchistic element of the game. The SH-5 is the peak of the SH series. But it’s a very precise piece of equipment compared to other vintage synths, where the sound can be enormous and challenging to fit in.
There’s a lot more Roland gear in there, too, like the JUNO-60, MKS-80, and string tones from the VP-330 and RS-505 that are so heavily treated you probably can’t recognize them. The religious aspect of the score versus the dark industrial side is quite fascinating. I was mixing styles that would not typically go together, which was a lot of fun.”
